South Asia Section, School of Languages, Cultures & Linguistics

Junior Year Abroad

The South Asia Department at SOAS warmly welcomes students from the United States on Junior Year Abroad programmes, and indeed welcomes all international students interested in studying with us for a term, a semester or a year as part of their undergraduate degree. We offer a range of courses that may complement those studied in your home university – language courses at various levels (from ‘scratch beginner’ upwards) in Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Nepali, Pali, Panjabi, Sanskrit, Sinhala, Tamil and Urdu, courses in the literatures of several of these languages, and courses in other aspects of the culture such as literature in English, and Hindi cinema. Whether you choose to come here for a full year or just a semester, you will find it easy to integrate into our programmes (even if we spell the word differently!) and you will quickly settle in as a fully participating member of our small and enthusiastic classes. We have a lot of experience in guiding JYA students to appropriate courses, and if you have any questions on the course choices currently available, feel free to contact the Department (southasia@soas.ac.uk). For more general enquiries about applying, or about entrance requirements and credit transfer, please see Why Study Abroad at SOAS?. Once in SOAS you will have access to an advisor to JYA students as another source of information about the way we do things here.

We think that the quality of the courses we offer is itself a compelling reason for you to come to SOAS. But there are other reasons also. SOAS has an international environment with students and staff from a wide variety of backgrounds, and is a major centre for the study of South Asia within many different disciplines. London is an important centre of South Asian culture – a kind of microcosm of the subcontinent, with a year-round profusion of events relating to the arts, culture, politics and religion of the region. Some parts of London even have station- or street-names in scripts such as Gurmukhi and Bengali, and whichever area of language is the focus of your interest, you will find it represented in SOAS and in the city around us. Finally, as a Department we benefit greatly from having international students here, because they often give us new perspectives on the subjects we teach and study, and the connections we have made with universities across the world have been of great value to us.